Nearly 40 Percent Of Europeans Suffer Mental Illness

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (From Reuters.com): “Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.

[These are the results of] “a three-year study covering 30 European countries — the 27 European Union member states plus Switzerland, Iceland and Norway — and a population of 514 million people.

“Wittchen’s [director of the institute of clinical psychology and psychotherapy at Germany’s Dresden University and the lead investigator on the European study] team looked at about 100 illnesses covering all major brain disorders from anxiety and depression to addiction to schizophrenia, as well as major neurological disorders including epilepsy, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.

“Mental illnesses are a major cause of death, disability, and economic burden worldwide, and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will be the second leading contributor to the global burden of disease across all ages.”

My Comment: In the harsh egoistic world, a person fights for his existence and spends all his energy, health, and life on this. Only the transition to an integral society will give people inner balance and peace, relieve them of the causes of all illnesses and disorders. When the whole society becomes like one family, every person is permeated with a common concern—the energy of a healthy space, Light—and the cause of all ailments disappears.
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The Spiritual Ascent Gym

Dr. Michael LaitmanWe do not reveal all the things we wish to reveal with our own strength in our current vessel of perception, meaning the desire to receive pleasure, but rather, in the qualities of bestowal. The corporeal world is revealed in the qualities of reception, while the spiritual world in the qualities of bestowal.

We are not able to see or sense anything in the spiritual world because we do not have the property of bestowal. We perceive everything we experience in our desire to receive pleasure directed “toward oneself,” while the spiritual world is perceived in the desire to bestow when exiting the desire to receive pleasure, “outside of oneself.”

How can we come closer to this when these two forms of perception are opposite to each other? Kabbalists say the following: Try to play at bestowal, practice it, doing the same action with the others, when every person, together with everyone else, tries to come “out of himself,” of his ego, towards the others. Imagine this aspiration as much as you can.

In this aspiration, when you think that you are coming out of yourself towards the others, you begin to attain, perceive, and understand what the spiritual world is. You do not understand anything in it, you are not able to analyze or test it, or evaluate your actions. But these efforts gradually build readiness—(“muscles”) within you, which you already have but simply don’t use.

Different parts of your future, your soul’s big body, are instilled in you, in your point in the heart, like in a drop of semen, and this body of the soul develops through you constantly exerting effort. Why is this so? Since your efforts to exit yourself towards a fellow human being combine with the strengths of everyone else, united in one common aspiration, this activates these “muscles.”

When every person in the group thinks about coming out of himself towards the others, he adds the strength of his special “muscle” to everyone else. This way everyone begins to increase his “muscles” with his ability to develop and come out of himself.

It follows that every person only has one point of exiting oneself: the joint aspiration. But all the rest who also think about coming out of themselves, they are the ones who, by including themselves into him, build the structure of the future Partzuf in him (and every person does this in everyone else). This does not mean that they give him anything from their “muscles.” They give him strength for the development of the information gene (Reshimo) called his point in the heart, a drop of semen.

It follows that none of us is able to develop on his own in any direction, in not one “muscle” of our 613 forces, desires. We can only develop through mutual inclusion in one another. The Creator sends us friends, haters, conflicts, wars, problems, and pressure, all these different situations, to provide us with this kind of mutual inclusion. When we work correctly on the basis of these problems, then the more acute and dramatic the sensations of these situations are, the higher and steeper degrees of ascension they become.

This is why we need to add all the different situations that arise in the group and in every person’s life and the difficulties in their inner spiritual work to our study, and see how much we can advance specifically on the basis of problems and complications. We see this in the Torah tales: More problems get revealed every time, and ever new ascents occur above them. And this goes on until we achieve complete correction (Gmar Tikkun).

For this reason, when we read The Zohar, we need to concentrate on the fact that all of us together desire to come out of our ego towards the others. This way every one of us grows his vessel (desire)—the spiritual Partzuf built specifically from everyone’s mutual inclusion.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/6/2011, The Zohar

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Kabbalists On Perception Of Reality, Part 16

Dr. Michael LaitmanDear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

Thought. Movement. Time.

The desire is the root of the mind and not the mind the root of desire.
– Baal HaSulam, “Peace in the World

The desire is the “self” of the person, and the thought is the consequence, outcome of the desire.
– Baal HaSulam, Shamati (I Heard), Article No. 153, “The Thought Is an Upshot of the Desire

The mind is enslaved by and serves the desire.
-Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 21
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